Jacob's Room & The Waves: Two Complete Novels

by Virginia Woolf

The story of a man’s life from a day in his childhood to the day of his death. “Jacob’s Room...comes as a tremendous surprise. The impossible has occurred. The style closely resembles that of Kew Gardens....The break with Night and Day and even with The Voyage Out is complete. A new type of fiction has swum into view” (E. M. Forster).

'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, The Waves. Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. Six children - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis - meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore. The subsequent continuity of these six main characters, as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions, is interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature. In pure stream-of-consciousness style, Woolf presents a cross-section of multiple yet parallel lives, each marked by the disintegrating force of a mutual tragedy. The Waves is her searching exploration of individual and collective identity, and the observations and emotions of life, from the simplicity and surging optimism of youth to the vacancy and despair of middle-age.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels

383 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1960

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacob’s Room reads to me as if it were almost a practice run for Mrs. Dalloway. Though it encompasses more in time and space, most of it is set in London. While it's a novella, it’s not necessarily a quick read as some of the passages read like poetry. It's not as perfect as Mrs. Dalloway, but still an interesting way of writing a novel, not focusing so much on Jacob, but on the world he inhabits and the world that surrounds him. There’s a lot of wave imagery, which had me wondering if that’s why this novella was paired with The Waves in this edition. (February 5, 2013)

[P.S. The character of Jacob here and the character of Percival in The Waves, who is so important to The Waves's six speaking characters, also links the two works.]

The Waves took a while for me to read, not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because I wanted to reread so many sentences. That's something I do with poetry, and this novel could certainly be classified as such. It’s safe to say that I’ve never read anything like The Waves before. I had no idea of the style before I started and I was taken aback by the first few pages and reread those once I realized what Woolf was doing.

My thanks to Murph (aka James) for a little conversation we had elsewhere about the characters. His mention of T.S. Eliot confirmed something that was lingering in my mind about the influence of “Prufrock” here, not to mention the influence of James Joyce. I also detected some "The Beast in the Jungle" (Henry James) influence.

And in turn, through this work, I see the influence on present-day writers, such as Paul Harding (Tinkers) -- not only in style, but with the use of science and nature for extraordinary, revelatory imagery; and also, for the first time, Ali Smith, most especially in the themes of a short chapter (ending with Neville’s voice) and its use of the second person.

While both of these works deserve to be reread (especially The Waves, though reading it once was almost exhausting it contains so much, and I mean that in a good way) and both are truly amazing (thus deserving of 5 stars), I am ranking them with 4 because I still love Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse even more. (February 14, 2013)

[Drew Rhine · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this was just The Waves it would be five stars! Jacob’s Room, in singular paragraphs, occasionally reaches the density and beauty that is weaved through just about every page of The Waves. I think Jacob’s Room, as a first novel, definitely displays the uniqueness of Woolf’s prose and empathy, and serves an interesting purpose for that alone.

But the Waves? I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve never read anything like that before. You move from “how is she accomplishing this?” to “how is she still doing this??” to “how the hell did she do that??????”
You could reread any paragraph and get something new, notice something beautiful or connect it to another phrase somewhere within. Poetry and prose are indistinguishable here.

[A.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still currently reading this text as I've only finished Jacob's Room. This review will only deal with that for now. Once I've finished The Waves, you can guess the rest.

With regards to Jacob's room, it shows a very interesting portrait of a soldier. It was interesting because the novel does not mention the war until the end of the story. But, as Woolf intended, this was not the interest of the story. The interest of the story, as I soon realized, is to humanize the people that we see go off to war, to show that they are, in fact, real people with real backgrounds, ups and downs, all of it. This facet of the story is a compelling one that I enjoyed immensely albeit occasionally frustrating.

Additionally, I liked Woolf's fractured take on English grammar. This might not seem groundbreaking, but when you read enough books, using a semi-colon to break-up a list of actions has a much greater effect than using a comma. Although much of this grammar was bad from a formal perspective, it gave the story more movement and balance. I thoroughly enjoyed Jacob's Room; I can only hope that I also enjoy the Waves.

Update: As the case were, I did enjoy The Waves. Much like ocean waves, there is an initial impenetrability, but that soon passes once one lets the waves flow over their body and absorb them. I would tell anyone who wants a real story to steer clear. If you are looking for an experimental film on paper, this would fit well. If you are looking for something dangerous, the waves would also work.

[Emily]

The Waves is one of the only Woolf novels for which I feel more detached appreciation than visceral enjoyment. This experiment in abstract character study, tracing the inner lives of six friends from childhood to death through the use of extended inner monologues intercut with third-person descriptions of the sun rising and setting over an ocean vista, is certainly fascinating, but it doesn't set my heart soaring like Mrs. Dalloway, nor does it tickle me like Orlando. It's a dense, quiet read, a sort of book-length expansion of the "Time Passes" section in To the Lighthouse, which implies through its narrative technique that people, along with sun and sea, are part of the continual ebb and flow of the natural world, however much they may tell themselves otherwise.

And whereas my favorite Woolf books often celebrate the transcendent moments of communion between people—difficult, fleeting, imperfect as they often are—it always strikes me that The Waves dwells instead on the ways in which we are all separate, remote. For despite the author's chosen narrative method—long inner soliloquies that begin "'.....,' said Bernard," or "'.....,' said Rhoda"—the characters almost never reply or react to one another. They are "saying" these things in some semi- or sub-conscious level of their beings, a level to which none of their friends have access, and couldn't, perhaps, understand, even if they did. They are "saying" them into the void. A far cry, this, from the ease with which Clarissa and Peter move in and out of each others' thoughts in Mrs. Dalloway. With Bernard (the phrase-making extrovert), Susan (the solitary naturalist), Rhoda (the depressive fantasist), Neville (the intellectual purist), Louis (the snobbish mogul), and Jinny (the sensualist) we have six tracks of thought and sensation moving parallel, seeing at times the same events from different angles, observing the exteriors of the speaker's friends, but almost never coming into actual contact with one of the other trains of thought. Even the extroverted Bernard, who needs the company of other people in order to come fully into his own, is only using others in the service of his own self-realization; he's not actually connecting with the cores of their beings, and his story-telling is an attempt to impose order on the world around him, more than to empathize with others.

I wish then after this somnolence to sparkle, many-faceted under the light of my friends' faces. I have been traversing the sunless territory of non-identity. A strange land. I have heard in my moment of appeasement, in my moment of obliterating satisfaction, the sigh, as it goes in, comes out, of the tide that draws beyond this circle of bright light, this drumming of insensate fury. I have had one moment of enormous peace. This is perhaps happiness. Now I am drawn back by pricking sensations; by curiosity, greed (I am hungry) and the irresistible desire to be myself. I think of people to whom I could say things: Louis; Neville; Susan; Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness. We shall meet tonight, thank Heaven. Thank Heaven, I need not be alone.

It's a lonely vision, I must say. Because despite Bernard's thanks to Heaven that he need not be alone, these characters are profoundly isolated from one another. And although I relate to its "We perished, each alone" ethos to some degree (I believe there are things we must all face alone), I miss the flashes of soul-deep connection that happen in other Woolf novels. Even those characters who crave solitude over company have a certain manic insecurity about their existences. Neville, the serial monogamist, lives in constant fear of abandonment by his lover du jour (openly portrayed as men, by the by). Louis must prove himself better than the Brits who may or may not be sneering at his Australian accent. Rhoda lives in terror and awe of the worlds conjured by her imagination. Only Susan, who finds a soulful connection with the natural world and in the process of childbearing and mothering, seems in any sense at peace to me.

I go then to the cupboard, and take the damp bags of rich sultanas; I lift the heavy flour on to the clean scrubbed kitchen table. I knead; I stretch; I pull, plunging my hands in the warm inwards of the dough. I let the cold water stream fanwise through my fingers. The fire roars; the flies buzz in a circle. All my currants and rices, the silver bags and the blue bags, are locked again in the cupboard. The meat is stood in the oven; the bread rises in a soft dome under the clean towel. I walk in the afternoon down to the river. All the world is breeding. The flies are going from grass to grass. The flowers are thick with pollen. The swans ride the stream in order. The clouds warm now, sun-spotted, sweep over the hills, leaving gold in the water, and gold on the necks of the swans.

This intrigues me, because, from what I know of her biography, Susan and Louis are probably the characters who overlap the least with Woolf's own experience. Susan lives the kind of traditional, pastoral life that her author, who lived amongst bohemians, never had children, and got intensely restless for London whenever her husband attempted to spirit her away to the countryside, did her best to escape. Perhaps, in Susan's contentment, Woolf is romanticizing the path not taken? Perhaps that romanticization is also behind the role of Percival, the bluff, popular, unintelligent Son of Britain who inspires the love of all six friends before sailing off to India in service of the Empire, and dying suddenly when thrown from his horse? Percival (named in the heroic tradition of Perceval / Parzival ) is perceived by all four friends as a hero, and inspires disquieting imperialist dreams in them despite their simultaneous contempt for his lack of intelligence:

I see India [...:] Over all broods a sense of the uselessness of human exertion. There are strange sour smells. An old man in a ditch continues to chew betel and to contemplate his navel. But now, behold, Percival advances; Percival rides a flea-bitten mare, and wears a sun-helmet. By applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. He rides on; the multitude cluster around him, regarding him as if he were—what indeed he is—a God.

Woolf does sometimes display the casual racism of her time, but I don't think she goes so far as endorsing Bernard in this little white-supremacist fantasy of his. I think she's portraying Percival as the morally questionable glue that holds the friends together, the traditional lunk whose presence lulls those benefiting by the British Empire into comfort and security. The characters make him into a conquering hero in their minds, but after his pointless death (as after the First World War, caused in part by imperialist in-fighting, destroyed Woolf's generation's confidence in pre-War institutions), they are cast adrift on their own reconnaissance. As Neville says, "without Percival there is no solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without a background."

Which goes a long way toward describing The Waves in general. Beautifully realized, eloquent as Woolf's prose is, it illuminates the psychology of an unmoored and anxious time, in which one set of standards had been proved false, and another set had yet to be found. And a time in which, nevertheless, people continued living much as before - either because they clung to the old dreams (Susan fantasizes about her own sons going to India) or because, as the pounding waves would seem to indicate, human ways of life are dictated by natural rhythms, leaving very little to individual choice. It's not that I necessarily disagree with this observation (although I don't go as far as Woolf with it), but that, unmitigated by moments of genuine human connection, it no longer feels true to my reality. Needless to say, were I recovering from a brutal World War only to witness the rise of Fascist and Communist totalitarianism across Europe, accompanied by a global economic meltdown, I might feel differently.

[Rebecca I · Rating 5 out of 5]

It takes a moment to get into the genius that Virginia Woolf is, and it can't be taken in all at once. I started to feel the way her writing moves with the first novel, but really had the feeling in the second. The repetition, the close up inner sanctum of a person's observances, the nonstop pressure of life comes on in waves. I had no idea what this author was like, but now I want to read more. It is beautiful and terrible at the same time.

[Rex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't really care for Jacob's Room but The Waves gave me life

[Elizabeth Schaefer · Rating 5 out of 5]

So incredibly beautiful, there’s no one who can write like her, who can capture things more vividly than one even experiencing them, I wish I could give it more than 5 stars

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woolf is the most poetic of prose writers. In particular, The Waves is one long poem.

[Lily Hoffman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jacob’s room was the most forgettable thing ever and the waves was bad until the end which was good kinda

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the edition that I am using, but I plan to read and review each novel separately.

March 8, 2008: I finished Jacob's Room. A decent novel - kind of experimental. It reminded me a lot of Evan Connell's Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge. Essentially, the book is a series of short episodes from the lives of people who interact with the main character, Jacob Flanders, throughout his life. The perspectives shared are mainly those of his mother and her acquaintance, his friends from college, and the women he is romantically interested in or who are interested in him (never the same people, regrettably). But Woolf also includes perspectives from passersby on the street, and sometimes the narrative wanders completely away from Jacob Flanders for a few pages.

I am finding that, for me, a Virginia Woolf novel or story is best read in a quick burst, at most over a couple of days. Most of her text consists of description or the fleeting thoughts of characters...little dialogue, and almost no narrative backstory (relevant backstory info is usually revealed in the aforementioned fleeting thoughts). Also, I suspect that Woolf leaves out a lot of detail because her characters lived in a small, confined land where many people had a shared understanding of common experiences, and most American readers of today won't really know what she's referring to. For example, the end of the second chapter states that, as a result of the events of the story up to that point, "Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up to Cambridge in October 1906."

Now, I'd think that Cambridge in 1906 meant something to Woolf's contemporary readers...it meant a specific type of educational experience as opposed to say, Oxford or Sandhurst, I'd guess...and it likely meant that, in the stratified English society of the time, that Jacob was likely to develop certain political and cultural attitudes (this seems to be alluded to later in the novel), be attracted to certain types of women (though part of the conflict in the latter half of the novel seems to be about his short relationships with women of a different, "less respectable" class), and be drawn (or forced?) into certain occupations (I think he becomes a solicitor).

Again, the readers of Virginia's day would have gotten all that. For me, the lack of explanatory detail was confusing, especially when I had to set the novel down for a few days and then come back to it. Again, had I read this in an uninterrupted sitting, as I read Mrs. Dalloway, I wouldn't have been bothered by this too much. I love the way Virginia writes...her prose just flows along and I find that I can read her very quickly. And her books seem to be pretty short, so they can be read in a quick burst.

As for this particular book, my current opinion is: great start, OK middle, confusing ending. The back cover of the book says that Jacob died in the war, but I likely would have missed that completely had it not been for that statement in the back cover. Brief remarks by other characters definitely allude to a developing war, but Jacob does not seem to be caught up in this situation at all, and then the last chapter (which is only a page) consists of his mom and one of his best friends inventorying his room.

Maybe that was the point Virginia was trying to make...that a life of a young man preoccupied with so many other things could be cut short by an impersonal external political development that he had nothing to do with. And maybe the readers of her day would have understood that (this story was published in 1923). But because I'm not too familiar with the details of her times, it didn't have the emotional impact for me that it might have had for her contemporary English readers.

To remedy my understanding of this story and other books by Virginia Woolf that I intend to read, I will be keeping an eye out for a decent book of literary criticism on her works, and I may also read the full-length biography of Virginia by Hermione Lee.

So, bottom line on JACOB'S ROOM: decent story, if you like Virginia Woolf. Read it quickly and enjoy the prose. If you slow down to consider how some of the details all connect together, it might get a little confusing.

[Amerynth · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be honest, I really didn't particularly enjoy reading "Jacob's Room" or "The Waves" -- they both seemed sort of tedious and something to get through. They are the only stories by Virginia Woolf that I've read thus far, so maybe she is just a poor fit for me.

I really didn't like "Jacob's Room" -- a tale told mainly through other people's eyes. I like that Virginia Woolf has clearly created whole histories for her characters, which she feels no need to share except in hints or dribbles along the way. But in this case, you really find out so little about the character, it was hard to care about him at all... since most of the book was about his outer shell and the pieces of Jacob that other people saw.

I liked "The Waves" more -- it was clearly the more accessible work of the pair. The story is told through the inner monologues of six narrators as they pass from one stage of life into the next. Their inner thoughts read like poetry, but I just found that they went on too long.... my interest in the work just ebbed and flowed so much.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

'With infinite time before us,' said Neville, 'we ask what shall we do? Shall we loiter down Bond Street, looking here and there, and buying perhaps a fountain-pen because it is green, or asking how much is the ring with the blue stone? Or shall we sit indoors and watch the coals turn crimson? Shall we stretch our hands for books and read here a passage and there a passage? Shall we shout with laughter for no reason? Shall we push through flowering meadows and make daisy chains? Shall we find out when the next train starts for the Hebrides and engage a reserved compartment? All is to come.'

'For you,' said Bernard, 'but yesterday I walked bang into a pillar-box. Yesterday I became engaged.

[Tami · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written, annoyingly slow. The Waves was so well done and so gorgeous, but way too long.. and it's only like 200 pages.